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Monthly Archives for March 2016

Overjoyed to report that my work has been selected for the upcoming exhibition, “Nowhere, Everywhere,” a show curated by Todd Bartel at the Thompson Gallery in Weston, MA. Check out my Artist’s Statement below, and the information card describing the details of the upcoming show, opening April 1!

Julie Rahilly, Peripatopian Architecture4, 2014

Poplar wood, piano hinges, wood screws, and blue-green stain

48 x 48 x 48 inches

$3000

“A vast, green structure, different in character than any I had hitherto seen…the face of it having the lustre, as well as the pale green tint, a kind of bluish-green…This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I was minded to push on and explore.”

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

A human-scaled architectural work, Peripatopian Architecture4 explores utopia through the 20th century concepts of the fourth dimension. Just as More’s “Utopia” questioned society, the Wells’ fourth dimension—described as the passing of time across a direction within the third dimension—represented liberation from tradition for the great physicists, artists, and writers of that time.

Published in Paris in 1936 on a loose sheet from a magazine, the “Manifeste Dimensioniste” contained signatures of the highest regarded avant-garde artists of the early 20th Century. These artists proclaimed that literature leave the line and enter the plane, painting leave the plane and enter space, and sculpture leave immobile form for four dimensions. Playing off of the original proclamations of the Dimensionist Manifesto, as well as the great dystopian literary work of H.G. Wells, Peripatopian Architecture4 challenges the three-dimensional architecture of today to go beyond the static. Peripatopian Architecture4 asserts that architecture has gone beyond structure to the kinetic, beyond program to the purposeless, beyond beauty to the visually ambiguous, and beyond site to the peripatetic. Intending to incite imagination through interaction, “Peripatopian” comes from peri– meaning “around” +patien meaning “to walk” +topos meaning “place” or, simply having an undefined place for an undefined space. This idea is explored through a series of six visually ambiguous, purposeless, flexible pieces that can collapse and expand or assemble and disassemble, offering flexibility in its arrangement.